World Game, sometimes called the World Peace Game, is an educational simulation developed by Buckminster Fuller to help create solutions to overpopulation and the uneven distribution of global resources. This alternative to war games uses Fuller's Dymaxion map and requires a group of players to cooperatively solve a set of metaphorical scenarios, thus challenging the dominant nation-state perspective with a more holistic "total world" view. The idea was to "make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone," thus increasing the quality of life for all people.
History and use The history of the World Game has conflicting origins. Fuller was influenced by his studies of war games at the Naval War College, though the Los Angeles Times also says he developed the idea in reaction to extensive news coverage of the Pentagon's war games. Development appeared to have begun in the late 1940s according to the Schumacher Center. However, Fuller is also said to have originated the idea in 1927, and proposed it in 1961 and 1964 (as a public activity for the U.S. pavilion, later known as the Montreal Biosphere, at the 1967 International and Universal Exposition in Montreal, Canada—which the U.S. Information Agency rejected). The Los Angeles Times says he publicly proposed the concept in "the late 1960s". In any case, Fuller and artist John McHale intended to implement the World Game as the core curriculum at the (then-new) Southern Illinois University Carbondale in 1967, and founded the World Resources Inventory, an institute responsible for conducting the research required for the game launch. In a preamble to World Game documents for the curriculum released in 1971, Fuller identified it very closely with his "Guinea Pig 'B' experiment" and his "Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science" lifework. He claimed intellectual property rights as well to control what he considered to be misapplication of his idea by others. He also claimed he had been playing it "longhand" without the assistance of computers since 1927. Nevertheless, Fuller's proposal imagined "a vast computerized network that could process, map, and visualize environmental information drawn from, among other sources, Russian and American spy satellites. Fuller claimed that their optical sensors and thermographic scanners could detect the location and quantity of water, grain, metals, livestock, human populations, or any other conceivable form of energy." The Game would, according to Fuller, transcend human perception's limits in the electromagnetic spectrum, and allow a rich dataset of global environmental trends. Over fifty hours from June 12 to July 31, 1969, Fuller and 27 grad students from a variety of disciplines met on the court of the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, to play the first instance of the World Game, the goal being to end energy poverty by giving all the world population 2000 gigawatt-hours per person per year by 1980; the final strategy revolved around constructing more hydropower. Footage was captured by Herbert Matter for the documentary The World Game. In 1972, the World Game Institute was founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, by Fuller, Medard Gabel, Howard J. Brown and others. In 1980, the World Game Institute and the World Resources Inventory published the World Energy Data Sheet. The World Energy Data Sheet compiled a nation by nation summary of energy production, resources, and consumption. The information was compiled in tables and map formats. The project was researched by Seth Snyder and overseen by Medard Gabel. The work was used during a World Game in Philadelphia, in the summer of 1980. By 1993, the World Game Institute developed and sold an educational software package called Global Recall, which contained global data, maps, an encyclopedia of world problems, and tools for developing solutions to world problems. The package was a computer-based simulation game intended for use by high school and college students in learning about world problems and how to solve them. In 2001, a for-profit educational company named o.s. Earth Inc. purchased the principal assets of the World Game Institute and offered a Global Simulation Workshop that is a "direct descendant of Buckminster Fuller's famous World Game." In 2019, the company transferred its assets to the Schumacher Center for New Economics. In 2021, Gabel's new organization, the Global Solutions Lab, announced their own revamp of the World Game, titled WorldGame 2.0.
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